Word: spenser
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...story, and for the past 36 years its greatest practitioner was Robert B. Parker, who died on Jan. 18 at 77. In the genre's lineage of hard-boiled icons, the baton passed from Dashiell Hammett to Raymond Chandler to Ross Macdonald and finally to Parker, whose mononymous detective, Spenser, long ago entered the pantheon inhabited by Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer. Although Parker's body of work included books featuring other protagonists, it is Spenser who will endure and whose adventures will be read in the next century...
Smart-alecky, funny, fearless, loyal and honorable, Spenser was so like his creator that the words poured out of Parker's fertile brain at an astounding rate. Beginning with The Godwulf Manuscript in 1974, Parker wrote prolifically; in recent years he published at least three books annually but penned more, an output that ensures avid readers will have new material to devour. Parker once said that while he tried to write slower, the books didn't get any better. He thought and spoke the way he wrote; his voice was Spenser's, and it was impossible not to be entertained...
...Spenser was the oldest, proudest bank on Wall Street, but it had entered into the early stages of a slow decline around the time I was hired. It was in all honesty this trend toward mediocrity that best explains my hiring.' --PAGE 54 OF mergers & acquisitions BY DANA VACHON...
...characters are so tough and self-assured, you want to grab the lapels of their leather jackets and tell them, as Max Eastman once told Hemingway, to come out from behind the false hair on their chest. But Parker is always a breezy read, and in this, his 34th Spenser mystery, the macho posturing is tempered by a plot that turns on his hero's vulnerability and one of his good deeds gone bad. A runaway he rescued from a life of low-rent prostitution (by putting her in the care of a high-priced madam) has dug herself into...
...professional side of my life is totally different from anything I had even remotely imagined at college. My head then was full of Yeats, Dante, Spenser and Beaudelaire, and, if I thought of any occupation at all, I suppose it was teaching and writing,” he wrote. Instead he had found his professional niche in international law—an area which he found “surprisingly exciting and satisfying...